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Authors: Jodi Lynn Anderson

May Bird and the Ever After

BOOK: May Bird and the Ever After
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Standing up straight again, May looked at the sky. There was the sun, up behind the filmy clouds that were darting away, She looked down at the water, then up again. Sut the sun's reflection was in a whole other place entirely. This light almost looked like it was
in
the water. May leaned a little bit farther, Squinting. The light moved, quick, like a fish.

May sucked in her breath. She knew she'd lost her balance the moment it happened. She swung her arms out at her sides to right herself, but it was too late. She toppled forward and hit the water with a splash.

—from May
Bird and the Ever After

Most people aren't very comfortable in the woods, but the woods of Briery Swamp fit May Bird like a fuzzy mitten. There, she is safe from school and the taunts and teases of kids who don't understand her. Hidden in the trees. May is a warrior princess, and her cat, Somber Kitty, is her brave guardian.

Then May falls into the lake.

When she crawls out. May finds her-self in a world that most certainly does not feel like a fuzzy mitten. In fact, it is a place few living people have ever seen. Here towns glow blue beneath dipping stars and the people—
people?
—walk, through walls. Here the
Book of the Dead
holds the answers to everything in the universe. And here. If May is discovered, the horrifyingly evil Bo Cleevil will turn her into nothing.

May Bird must get out.

Fast.

Within these pages, Jodi Iynn Anderson shares with us the beginning of May Bird's daring journey into the Ever After, a haunting place where true friends—and one Jumble foe—await May around every corner.

Jodi Lynn Anderson
grew up in New Jersey, where she spent a lot of time walking in the woods, pretending she was a queen. Today she lives in the haunted town of Roswell, Georgia, where she spends her time writing, and wishing she had a hairless cat.

Jacket design by Debra Sfetsios Jacket illustration copyright © 2005 by Leonid Gore

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Atheneum Books for Young Readers Simon & Schuster New York

Atheneum Books for Young Readers

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real

locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the

products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or

locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2005 by Jodi Lynn Anderson

Illustrations copyright © 2005 by Leonid Gore

Map on pp. x-xi by Peter Ferguson

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction

in whole or in part in any form.

First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

eISBN: 978-1-4391-0754-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anderson, Jodi Lynn.

May Bird and the Ever After / by Jodi Lynn Anderson.

p. cm.

Summary: Lonely and shy, ten-year-old May Ellen Bird has no idea what awaits

her when she falls into the lake and enters the Ever After, home of ghosts

and the Bogeyman.

ISBN-13: 978-0-689-86923-5

ISBN-10: 0-689-86923-1

[1. Fantasy.] 1. Title.

PZ7.A53675Mayb 2005

[Fic]—dc22   2004017829

For

Mom and Dad

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BOOK: May Bird and the Ever After
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